In case you missed it, here is what happened on January 26

The Bombardier C Series aircraft flight test vehicle one (FTV1) takes off during its maiden flight at the Montreal-Mirabel International Airport in Mirabel, 50 kilometres north of Montreal on Monday, September 16, 2013. Dario Ayala / Montreal Gazette files

The decision by the U.S. International Trade Commission to overturn duties of nearly 300 per cent on imports of Bombardier C Series planes was greeted with surprise and joy in Montreal. “It’s great news, it threw me off my chair, to be honest,” said David Chartrand, the Quebec coordinator of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents 6,000 workers at Bombardier plants in the Montreal area. “With the cultural context that’s prevailing in the United States right now, with the protectionism and the Trump administration that’s in place, I was convinced, and a lot of people were also convinced, that they’d support the decision and go forward with the Boeing complaint. The fact that it was overturned not by two, not by three but by four unanimously, we’re just ecstatic, we’re happy, we couldn’t have asked for a better result.”

The head of the McGill University Health Centre defended on Friday the decision to scale back Code White violent-incident training for nurses and other staff dealing with patients and visitors at the Montreal General Hospital. For the first time since an ER nurse was nearly strangled by a patient at the Montreal General last September, the interim executive director spoke at an MUHC public meeting about the assault and the need to tighten security at the downtown hospital. Martine Alfonso’s comments came after the publication of a four-part series by the Montreal Gazette this week highlighting numerous security anomalies at the Montreal General, a Level 1 trauma centre that also has a psychiatric emergency room.

Concordia University has issued explicit guidelines on consensual romantic or sexual professor-student relationships, a move that was fast-tracked in response to recent allegations of sexual misconduct against professors in the university’s Creative Writing program. The guidelines state the university “strongly discourages all instructors from commencing or continuing any consensual romantic or sexual relationship with a student.” The document defines such a relationship as a conflict of interest that must be disclosed to the administration. “Because of the power imbalance that exists in the academy, the university discourages, in the strongest possible terms, any consensual romantic or sexual relationships between instructors and their students,” writes provost and vice-president academic affairs Graham Carr in a memo about the new guidelines published on the university’s website Friday. “At the very least, such relationships constitute a real or perceived conflict of interest and should be avoided.”

Antonio Accurso and former Mascouche mayor Richard Marcotte were close friends long before Marcotte was elected to the post, a jury was told on Friday. Accurso’s eldest son, Jimmy Accurso, was called to the witness stand on Friday at the Joliette courthouse where his father is on trial on a charge related to alleged municipal corruption in the city of Mascouche while Marcotte, who died in 2016, was mayor. Accurso is charged with helping Marcotte commit a breach of trust. On Wednesday, before he began presenting defence witnesses, lawyer Marc Labelle told the jury that he would present evidence that Marcotte’s now-well-known vacations aboard Accurso’s yacht, called Touch, were nothing more than time spent together between friends.

Two people hold a modified design of the Canadian flag with a marijuana leaf in place of the maple leaf during a rally in Toronto in 2016. For the fifth-straight year, the number of cannabis-related offences reported to police in Canada dropped in 2016.Mark Blinch /
Canadian Press

Statistics Canada has a new survey for you to toketake. Ahead of Canada’s scheduled legalization of cannabis, the government agency is crowdsourcing a database of prices across the country. This is your big opportunity to tell a government entity just how much you’ve spent on a gram of dried cannabis and why you chose to make the purchase. Think of it as Weedmaps, but without the reviews or complaints about its advertising. Statistics Canada says all submissions are anonymous and will be used in a “system of national accounts to support the creation and validation of measures relating to the importance of the cannabis sector in the Canadian economy.”

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.